I've had moments where I've changed my cooking to mostly vegan, I just find that meat is so available in my culture, I think knowing that a food is consistently available increases my habitually eating it, I'm admittedly a pretty habitual eater, there's a pizza place near my work and I eat there almost every day, it's ironic since I've had bouts where I haven't eaten cheese, bread, or meat but now I eat shitty pizza from the same place again and again, they have only three types of pizza available by the slice and I usually grab the meat pizza because they just have a lot more calories, if they had good slices available with a good selection of vegetables I'd probably go for that... Why did I return to eating meat? I don't doubt there was probably some perception of class dynamics involved subliminally. The idea of meat and potatoes, after a day of work and a fourty ounce of old English split with my roommates had a certain romanticism to me at the time, the cheap sausages I bought were always the most consistent part of my day unlike the vegetables I could afford which were always bundles of vegetables that were already going bad. I think there's a demand for consistency in food especially from people who are experiencing a lot of chaos in their lives, you see it in children who are picky eaters, growing up is a chaotic time and most children have no control over their lives, we hold onto ideas of control that are related to the foods we eat. I think that meat is so culturally entrenched that it won't change any time soon, especially with the fast food industry.

No, not really. For me its a situation where I can't conceptualize a vegan agricultural system that would be sustainable. Maybe in a future where better technology exists, I could be convinced. For instance: if low-input synthetic fertilizers were developed or if botanical and agricultural research made perennial staple crops a real possibility, that would be a gamechanger. In that world, I could see how a worldwide vegan food system would be sustainable. But in the near term, the idea feels too utopian to me. So it feels like veganism (or similar practices) will remain practical only for people in richer, more privileged societies with higher overall energy usages or for the upper classes in poorer societies (see: "true veg" aka lacto-vegetarian or Brahmin diets in India). I have no doubt humans will get there, if our species survive the Anthropocene, but it doesn't feel achievable in my lifetime. I'm happy to talk about what I see as the ideal interim solution, but that almost seems off-topic here.

Instead I actually want to say that admire your dedication to this idea though, and even though I think worldwide veganism is a non-starter presently, I believe convincing those in developed countries with meat-centric food culture to adopt vegan diets is still a net positive. I'm going to make a suggestion of perhaps one conceptual exploration that I think may bear fruit for you in improving your conversion rate in these kind of debates:

I think the concept of carnism altogether may be harmful to your ability to convince people to convert. That's because it seems overly binary. The idea that we would group people who eat as much as 50% of their diet (or even more sometimes) in animal protein alongside people for whom it is only 5-15% of their diet doesn't leave much room for a reasonable debate in my mind. Such a discussion already has a powerful "us vs. them" connotation that may actually cause your opponent to entrench themselves and become harder to convince. It may be useful to retain the term in its binary sense for ethical discussions in a vegan context, but when debating with carnists, I think you will find more success if you instead conceptualize the issue as a sliding scale (let's say: carnivore, omnivore, vegetarian, vegan, etc or something else entirely -- I dunno).

The main difference in this approach is that I believe you should accept the other party's incrementalism as a win. In my opinion, framing the issue as such could not only be more persuasive but may also be less mentally exhausting for you, allowing you to keep up your stance more persistently over long periods of time without feeling frustrated. Basically: I feel you should think of it as a long war with several battles and not a single debate to be won, and you will have more overall success.

Is there such a thing as "ethical meat-eating"? I know it's possible to have things that animals produce in an ethical way, like eggs or wool, but every time I bring up "ethical meat" I never have real-life examples. It's way easier to convince people of animal warfare than it is for them to change their habits. I think we'd be better off trying to convince/force the ones that own these animal chains to make it ethical instead of trying to convince the individual with basically no power to change this system. It's not like a fraction of people who stop buying meat will slow down production. In the best-case scenario, it will make meat slightly more expensive, making it harder for poor people to get food, which in some ethics can be considered worse than fast producing meat.

In my opinion, the only thing that can convince me to change my mind is to actually see empirical evidence that me going vegan is going to provide the most utility. Until then the only thing I will do is protest the way this industry treats the animals, and advocate for policies that incentivize alternatives to meat to be cheaper, for policies that stop the necessary abuse of these animals, policies that invest in the least harm, which does not necessarily mean giving up all meat.

With that being said, there's a lot of issues that I still have with the vegan lifestyle, personal and ethical, like the price (not everyone can afford good vegan meals since it takes way more food to) and the argument that if there's no incentive to have wildlife safe (until they're eaten) then they will not survive easily. So these issues need to be resolved before I can actually change my beliefs completely.

I doubt it, or I would just think it and go vegan now! I don't eat meat but do eat eggs, dairy and have some leather shoes.

I've been mulling this question over because it's a hard one, I have been vegan in the past, I live and eat with vegans now so there is a lot of conversation about the benefits of veganism. I think perhaps what you experience when you challenge people and they agree is a sort of politeness. I don't really want to shit all over my vegan friends beliefs, I also don't want them to waste more energy on trying to convince me by prolonging an argument about some very specific point. If I wanted to be vegan I would.

This goes beyond your question so If you don't want to read about why I'm not vegan skip to the end for possible (utopian) things that would change my mind.

My thinking on my eating habits, animals and ethics has gone something like this.

1. Killing is wrong, I will not kill to eat. 2. There are forms of suffering that are potentially worse than death and definitely horrifying. I will not consume any animal products. 3. Agriculture is the process of eradicating all but one form of life in a given area. I saw my veganism as part of a project where I enacted my ideals in the world directly through my actions but at this point I realized that was impossible.

I guess the question is then, why did I revert to step 1 after reaching step 3? I think there's been a few reasons.

The first is financial. When I was forming these ideas I was objectively poor. I was surviving through the support of others. A large part of my calorific intake was from dumpster diving. I had no desire to eat meat but the thing that is most consistently thrown away is pastries. They generally have a shelf life of a day. I wasn't going to pass them up and I didn't feel like I was contributing to the industry so there was no harm in eating them. From then on I continued to eat animal products in one form or another

I'm no longer in that situation, but I am now relatively poor. Honestly the veganism of my housemates is a pretty shallow ethical consumerism. It revolves around leading a life that is in no way counter hegemonic, simply buying a drop in replacement for items they would otherwise purchase. I essentially resent it because I see ethical consumption as the worst possible form of voting, one where some people have many more votes than others.

The second is how eating animal products makes me feel. I'm not a nutritional expert but some time ago I was having periods in the day of intense exhaustion, I noticed that went away when I ate eggs in the morning. I don't know how I'd replicate that on a vegan diet, whether I could afford to eat what was required or whether I could afford the services of someone who is a nutritional expert. Also realistically I get great personal pleasure from eating other animal products ie cheese. There are sadly very few things that give me pleasure so I'm reticent to give them up.

The last is perhaps what you referred to as Nihilism elsewhere in the thread. My feeling is that with an inability to live your ideals that everything we do is a compromise. Veganism and my own practices just fall at slightly different points along a spectrum but ultimately aren't very distinct. I feel for the well being all life we should try to redress the balance of human and non-human life on earth. We should let the land return to mature ecosystems and we should seek our sustenance while having as little impact as possible. Realistically this would likely mean hunting and consuming animals that live non-domesticated lives.

What would it take for me to go vegan? Radical social change. Not the twin hells of atomizing neo-liberal consumerism and christian guilt and sin. It would look like public food halls where people eat communally without the exchange of money. Where the food creates pleasure, social support systems and delivers nutrition not just calories. When I eat like this with my house, I'm vegan, the rest of the time I'm not.

If anyone got this far..... well done!