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GaldraChevaliere wrote

Is there any general vegan plan or approach to ensuring food security that doesn't rely on just making even bigger monocultures (or even polycultures that still take that kind of space) to feed a burgeoning world population mostly reliant on meat as a food source? Especially with increasing desertification and mass insect die-offs that are largely a consequence of mass agriculture? What's the common feeling on rural and indigenous communities that are traditionally reliant on hunting, herding or scavenging, or food opportunism in general?

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happy wrote

The vegan plan is for people in the global north to stop eating as much meat and hopefully become vegan as well. Its something like 66% of all plant matter gets grown to feed livestock while eating livestock is 25% efficient in energy consumption than eating plants instead. Possibly I don't understand your question but the solution to me is for people to stop eating meat.

The problem isn't rural farmers, or indigenous communities, or the global south. The global north per capita consumers a lot more meat than individuals in the global south. The problem are the individuals living in cities where adapting a vegan diet is much, much easier. There are so many people with easy access to a vegan diet but they remain eating meat for selfish reasons.

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GaldraChevaliere wrote

Mate, I live in a city. A very, very big and a very, very polluted one. The cities literally rely on the countryside around them as breadbaskets and a solid half of general anti-civ thought is based around how the city exploits and drains everything in reach of it while poisoning its own inhabitants. There is very little that grows here, and the model of just using the farms to feed the cities is every bit as oppressive and alienating as it sounds. I live on an ovo-vegetarian diet because eggs are affordable and versatile, I'll be sick for hours if I ingest even a little meat. My diet is a hell of a lot more expensive to maintain than my girlfriend's, but vegans only care about framing things in a north-south first-world-third-world framework and don't actually consider the direct environmental consequences of living in either.

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[deleted] wrote

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GaldraChevaliere wrote

  1. Subsistence farming has been the historical practice and continues to be sustainable when practiced correctly. Meat becomes unsustainable in an economy of scale, but that pitfall cant be avoided with large scale agriculture either. The vegan obsession with not consuming any animal products is also ultimately harmful to domestic fowl, who lay excess eggs they'll forget about, goats and kine who lactate more than they need on a daily basis and can get swollen and painful udders as a result, and bees who can literally suffocate in their own excess honey.

  2. Meat hasn't been a rich people's food outside of the medieval era, strictly because of controls on hunting and poaching enacted by royal forests, which preceded and inspired the enclosure that shut the average person out of farming and herding entirely. Meat now is produced more cheaply on an economy of scale than vegetables and especially fruit are, especially in those regions that rely on it economically. Food deserts exist for a reason.

  3. If you've seen my positions on this before you know I'm not in favor of the factory farm either, nor do I argue for its necessity. I argue that the average person isn't able to take on veganism as an ideology because of environmental and economic pressures. It doesn't stand to reason that I'd support either because they're both intensely destructive, but the problem won't go away just because you stop eating meat.

  4. This is literally a "yet you participate in society" tier response. The agricultural industry as a whole uses enclosure to separate people from their food. My relationship to my food previously has been both scavenging and foraging for it (and, you could fancifully call it raiding, since much of my food source in the past had been stolen) and also raising our own poultry and vegetables. Now much of my food comes from leftovers from volunteering, but the environment I live in severely restricts my options in securing food for my family at all. You're arguing that you can just opt out of capitalism, which is fucking stupid and you know it. Your 'fringe groups' are largely poor rural farmers and minorities still reliant on the old ways, which is why I think veganism is a bourgeois ideology in the first place. It has no regard for the wellbeing of non-western, non-upper class people unless they can be weaponized.

4 bis: Like you're doing right now, for example! Iceland and Japan hunt on an industrial scale with nontraditional methods, with methods described as cruel by pretty much anyone who's witnessed it. The bullshit of powerful, first-world nations can't be compared to say, Inuit whalers who catch maybe one or two small whales a year while suffering depredations from colonial occupiers who restrict their food access and price-gouge them, meaning their traditional hunting isn't just one of the few links to their history they're still allowed to practice (at the mercy and allowance of those occupiers) but often key to survival.

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[deleted] wrote

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GaldraChevaliere wrote

  1. Depends on the birds. Not just their species, but their personal temperament. They'll definitely eat the shells and it's a good idea to mix them into their feed to give them calcium, but they usually do that after they're hatched unless they're starving. Barnyards are still ecosystems however and have some interactions that'd put off a lot of people used to thinking of them as happy little oases. Horses will straight up stomp chicks and eat them because they can, it's brutal. Because we've bred most udder-bearing animals to have outsized milk production, they'll produce an excess of milk that is more than their babies will drink in a day, which will make them swollen and uncomfortable and can cause them a lot of pain if left unchecked. I've seen vegans unironically compare milking to rape because a boob is being touched I guess, but to the animal it's therapeutic and necessary to its comfort, and if the milk isn't used it'll just be reabsorbed into the body anyway, so there's no point leaving the animal in pain and wasting the resource. You can also save it and set it aside if the mother dies or falls ill or rejects a calf, and use it as an emergency food source for the abandoned infant or for other adopted animals. Goat's milk in particular is hypoallergenic and can be given to a lot of different animals if their own isn't available. Bees can literally drown in their honey if it builds up too much. They'll produce more than they need and eventually have to abandon their hive or they'll get stuck in it. Their relationship to humans is symbiotic, we can build better hives for them with frames that can be removed to take the extra honey without disrupting their routines or sense of safety, and it enables them to stay there in safety, still producing more than enough for themselves. Abandoning beekeeping is a terrible idea and it's ridiculous to me that some vegans encourage it.

  2. I literally brought up the history of meat consumption before the US existed, and I'd really like if people stopped using "us-centric" as a gotcha like there aren't poor people here that are suffering, or that the US is a beast of its own with no parallels elsewhere. Red meat became expensive because the ability to hunt it was restricted to nobles, and you'll find that trend applies anywhere that's had a feudal or feudal-resembling system. Whether that's Europe in the 1200s, Japan in the 1600s, Arabia in the 1100s, that's been the trend. The lord restricts access to hunting grounds on penalty of death or banishment and monopolizes meat production for himself and his peers, supplementing hunted meat with taxed livestock from the peasantry. That's the very foundation of enclosure, we just distinguish enclosure from feudalism because enclosure was accompanied by industry and greater force to enact it with. Even the common farmer is oppressed by agriculture. You still must follow taxes on your produce, your livestock, the cost of medicine for your livestock and yourself, competition with global shipping that can send fruit only in season for you for a few months to another part of the world in the middle of winter, and the looming threat of a major Ag corp buying out your land or the government just straight up handing it to them. That you have to sell your produce at all to survive rather than using it for you and your community is oppressive, to have to sell food to have food.

  3. I mean, I figured you don't. You're not an asshole. And I trust subsistence hunters a lot better than I trust most 'animal activists', because they actually care about what happens to their prey's environment and strive to make the kill as painless and un-traumatic as possible. Fair chase is a regular idea to encounter among serious hunters and one I subscribe to. Even if my body didn't reject meat, I'd vastly prefer to be in a position where I could catch my own and ensure a gentle death than be party to the suffering of the slaughterhouse. I'm wary of lesser-evilism in general, especially that which holds death as something that must be avoided at all costs. Veganism smells a lot like repurposed christian morality to me in a lot of ways, even if it breaks from the traditional dogma of animals as mindless resources.

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[deleted] wrote

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GaldraChevaliere wrote

  1. Totally unsurprised that the cishet vegan wants to condescend to me about the needs of a life I've lived and he hasn't. You need the animals, one way or another, the whole reason we domesticated them was because they can do what we can't. You need the yard-birds to get rid of ticks that can make you or your herd sick. You need the goats to keep the grass low to keep snakes at the margins and not where they can be stepped on and hurt or pose a threat to you or your herd. And they are every bit as dependent on you as you become on them, domestic animals are not equipped to survive without us without either dying en masse or destabilizing the environment themselves. The boar population in the US is overwhelmingly composed of wild, feral pigs that eat everything and shit everywhere. Letting more pigs be "liberated" into the environment around them is a ridiculous idea and euthanizing them in mass would be a waste of life and, just as importantly since you're failing to get this, a total waste of meat. Is it any better if they die with nothing eating them just so you can feel good?

  2. Can't wait for Frenchie to start talking about americentrism, but a massive swath of the midwest and southeast of the US is heavily, heavily reliant on beef, pork and corn as both food and fodder for the former. The infrastructure here is built around the meat industry, and lack of economic and environmental regulations means the subsistence farms here are all struggling just to get by feeding themselves, let alone their communities. Meat is cheap, easy calories and it can be preserved with much less skill or education than jams or preserves can. You can stretch it a lot farther in a meal and use the leftovers in more meals after, but vegans never seem to care about people actually needing to feel full, just getting 'enough' to function. Vegetables here are fucking expensive and I've talked at length about that before, so I'd rather not reinvent the fucking wheel explaining to a vegan yet again that when fresh but low-quality vegetables cost nearly a dollar and a half a pound at a goddamn walmart the average person isn't going to gravitate towards them when meat is cheap, easy and filling. The price exponentially increases if you want anything better, and gardens are tightly controlled both by stringent and class-enforced zoning laws and housing policies and the increasing pollution and stripping of the land. Outside the US, this extends especially to desertified regions that don't have the water to grow vegetables, that have the same issues with colonialism and industry stripping and poisoning the soil and where many communities have become reliant on bush-meat just to get by.

  3. Again, you miss my point. For one, no, not everyone on raddle is western including a handful of fairly high-profile users. While the two off the top of my head (Tequila and Ziq) choose to eat vegan, they're also possessed of the means to do so and aware of that. Most people aren't, and it's not a pure dichotomy of western-eastern or northern-southern either. In the US and in the UK, most people are very fucking poor, and the land is like I keep telling you, unsuitable for large scale agriculture on a level that'd replace keeping cattle. If we 'got rid' (how??) of all the factory farms and cows, we'd still have to step up agriculture to replace the loss of a food source, and if you have high hopes for how that'll go, you're delusional. The land will be stripped just as hard if not harder, monocultures will still prevail and eventually start another dustbowl, and subsistence farmers will still get their land stolen or be sued into oblivion for accidentally growing someone's proprietary GMO when it drifts into their fields and takes seed. There is no ethical consumption, literally. There is no good option as long as livestocking and agriculture both continue the way they're going and by shifting the blame onto people's personal situations in which they must or choose to eat meat for any plethora of reasons, you're being that liberal asshole insisting the secret to fixing climate change is not using fucking straws.

  4. I dunno dude, I'm not the one who called them "fringe" in scare quotes in the first place, like they're doing something wrong by using what little autonomy they have to feed their tribes. You specifically brought up powerful first world countries that hunt on an industrial scale as a dodge, don't even try to wriggle out of that. Countries that are incredibly violent to their native populations, no less (Japanese treatment of the Ainu, Scandi treatment of the Sami), and who ironically are themselves largely reliant on hunting and herding at a sustainable level and find themselves in danger because of the restrictions of their hunting grounds by those same fucking countries.

What 50 years? What will grow in 50 years? You call yourself an environmentalist when you think at the current rate of bullshit there's going to be anything but desert succulents and mushrooms that we can actually grow? And like, "those poor cow udders", fucking yikes dude. I already know you care more about looking good and superior than about actual animal's wellbeing, but sure who gives a shit about cultures reliant on hunting to survive or the pain and discomfort animals are in because of the domestication we put them through in the first place? Why alleviate that, if it means maybe drinking some milk or eating some honey? Surely the excess product that they literally do not use is better spent going to waste or choking out the hive. You're fucking french, dude. You're richer than a lot of people.

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[deleted] wrote

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GaldraChevaliere wrote

  1. I understand what I'm talking about, don't play this game. There has to be a transitional period, but with the vegan all or nothing approach there won't be one because you can't grow enough food in that much time. Not happening overnight doesn't mean anything more than "I don't care about waiting even if it affects others". What gives you the right to determine that fate for them?

  2. Because it is broken, like you keep making me repeat myself. Being broken doesn't mean it's not the system we're living under right now, it's only the wealthy who get to opt out of it.

  3. Which in what way helps your point? Brazil's got a whole issue of its own with clearcutting of the rainforest and the cattle and crop barons owning everything in its rural zones. The importation of vegetables to different climactic regions so you can have some variety is part of the problem. Most animal feed is already fodder that'd be wasted. It's chaff and stalks mostly. To feed people the way we do now, which again I keep repeating needs to change, we need to completely overhaul or outright discard agriculture as it currently exists, and a transitional period can't do that fast enough without famine.

Not to be all internet tough girl but this is around the point you'd be losing teeth. Vegans across the board remain embarrassingly smug and self-absorbed. Your entire ideology is built around the judgement of the poor. You do nothing to help the world, you only serve as another drain on it. Acknowledge that.

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[deleted] wrote

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GaldraChevaliere wrote

Soy's also seriously water intensive and the fodder makes up a significant chunk of the cost of livestocking in the first place. There's no good answer that involves a monoculture or agriculture as it currently stands, and that's the point I keep trying to make while Bird has his head up his ass. Your personal consumption won't change the underlying structures and even if vegans had any structural power to change them, without an understanding of agriculture beyond just meat = bad veggies = good they're only going to put us in a worse situation.

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