Hey non-vegan, fun fact: No one really cares when you tell them eating plants are more efficient.
Common responses include “bAc0Nnnnnn!” and “I’m gonna eat two times the amount of meat to make your efforts useless”.
Comment on Those poor plants
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
hey vegans, cool fact, plant based diets are vastly more efficient and effective at feeding people than meat based diets.
Meat consumes plants to exist, most of that energy is lost. Not so much with plants.
Just start telling people this shit lmao. Who cares about morality when you can pretend to be saving the environment instead.
Soulcreator@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Soulg@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Amazing strawman at the end there.
Soulcreator@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Hi friend, I propose you try an experiment: post a small handful of anonymous comments on the Internet, try to make them benign as possible but casually slip in an acknowledgement that you are vegan. Something along the lines of “God that recipe looks amazing, but I think I might swap out the beef broth for veggie broth as I am vegan” like I said the point of this experiment is to say something completely as benign and inoffensive as possible.
Once you post sit back and wait for the responses to roll in. You will likely find that while not every time, it is incredibly common for people to send you pictures of bacon, and an abundant of angry responses to the mere offhand mention of the word.
I sincerely wish it was a straw man fallacy, but it unfortunately is a exceedingly common response to the word.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
It really isn’t. I know plenty of anti-vegans who react in that manner.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
hey non vegan vegan fun fact, you would be surprised at the sheer amount of consumption and productive the livestock sector of agriculture creates.
Likewise you could easily just respond to the last line with “you can’t take away my gas stove, i’m just going to burn gas lamps in my home now” and get a little bit eepy and sleepy due to all the buildup of combustion products inside your home.
theyoyomaster@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Cool, but steak is my favorite animal.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
true, cows are my favorite food.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Boobs are my favorite source of entertainment.
Wait… Nope, nothing to do with sustenance
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
nothing to do with sustenance
You think? I’m pretty sure that’s the purpose of boobs.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
hmm
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 months ago
You think they don’t? And environmentalism is also morality.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
environmentalism is morality sure, but doesn’t it seem silly to use an appeal to morality to push for more morality.
JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee 2 months ago
The animal industry feeds the plants as much as the plants feed the animals. I’m not sure how vegans feel about synthetic fertilizer like miracle grow, but that’s what will have to be used in place of manure if the meat industry goes away.
Many of the organic crops grown use animal manure to fertilize the plants. I know you can use seaweed and other plants for compost(weeds are already composted back in via tilling, seaweed requires harvesting from the ocean or long distance shipping from farms), as well as cycling crops to prevent nutrient deficiency…
BUT manure doesn’t just add nutrients. It adds beneficial bacteria that helps keep the soil healthy and make the nutrients bioavailable to plants. It conditions the soil for water retention, and helps break up clay soil and add organic matter to sandy soil.
Will vegans keep animals just for manure? Or will organic lables on food be less important? Are we going to start scraping the forests for leaves to chop up an add to farm soil? That can’t be good for forests though. I guess I’m just confused about how to maintain large farms without access to large amounts of manure.
skibidi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The ideal answer is compost, regenerative agriculture, and (better treated) human-sources waste.
Organic crop yields will almost certainly reduce a bit without animal waste fertilizer, but that is fine since crop consumption will fall by a greater amount due to not needing to feed a bunch of extra animals.
AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Veganic agriculture is already a thing, and it works fine.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
an interesting idea, but anything that decays and “composts” can be used as a fertilizer so.
This includes things like organic scraps, you don’t just have to use animal shit. Although it’s a pretty good one if you have access to it.
I think personally, we should move to a more decentralized food production system, to help alleviate some of the costs of industrial agriculture, which are pretty heavy.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
We humans shit as well
JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Diseases spread via human feces which why we tend to not use it. We could sanitize it by processing it, but then it won’t carry the benefit of beneficial bacteria cultures so it’s not as good as animal supplied manures.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
but much of the plant matter that animals eat is grazed or waste from some other agricultural product.
Cypher@lemmy.world 2 months ago
TBF land clearance for grazing land is a catastrophic issue for the environment and going on in places like the Amazon rainforest.
Some ecosystems are naturally evolved to supporting grazing species like the grasslands of North America which was once home to millions of Buffallo but that’s not true of most land currently used for grazing.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
land clearance for grazing land is a catastrophic issue for the environment and going on in places like the Amazon rainforest.
absolutely. I have some ideas about what to do about it, but none of them involve buying beans
Cypher@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s at a point where I’m all for a UN resolution to end land clearance in locations like the Amazon Rainforest, to be enforced by lethal means if necessary.
Billions of lives may depend on securing such important ecosystems.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
that can be true, but we also grow a substantial amount of feed for agriculture usage, even if it’s not local to us. A lot of alf alfa being grown is exported.
It’s all dependent on whatevers cheapest at the end of the day. And regardless of this fact, a lot of energy is still lost in this process, cows are a significant contributor to climate change, ironically.
LengAwaits@lemmy.world 2 months ago
There was a good discussion of this on Reddit recently. Sorry to link to Reddit, but it’s a good, topical post worth perusal.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
yeah that pretty much checks out. The best solution to climate change is to kill shit like private jets and yachts. But that’s unlikely to happen.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
all of agriculture is only about 20% of our GHG emissions. cows are a fraction of that… there are definitely bigger issues.
as for the alfalfa, it’s also a small fraction of global crops. 2/3 of all crop calories go to humans with only 1/3 going to livestock… this includes about 70% of the weight of the global soy crop (after we have pressed it for oil), as well as fodder like corn stalks. we basically fed livestock trash and get food. it’s a pretty good deal.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
all of agriculture is only about 20% of our GHG emissions. cows are a fraction of that… there are definitely bigger issues.
obviously, but in terms of livestock, cows are pretty significant.
30% of all global stock going to feed is a pretty large percentage of global crop production.
pyre@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m no vegan but that’s a common vegan talking point
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It is, but many vegans also do really unhelpful things that are closer to trying to berate or shame people into not eating meat and it is obviously not effective.
Objection@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Out of curiosity, how many people have you convinced to go vegan?
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
None. Why do I have to convince a single person to criticize an argument I don’t think is convincing?
pyre@lemmy.world 2 months ago
no arguments there
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
and it’s an interesting one too, if you like production stats at least.