There is a fundamental, unpleasant truth: People breed like other animal, namely, they breed until they reach the limits of their food supply.

If you feed Sudan, Bangladesh, or whatever other poverty-stricken area you choose, the only result is more people to feed next year. Before you can really help these people, you first have to get them birth-control, and get them to use it.

The only time and place this is not true is in countries with sufficient technology to offer birth-control to their entire population, and a sufficiently education population that will actually use it. In a word: high civilization.

If environmentalists and leftists like these "neo-puritanists" had the brains god have a sheep, they would support industry and education as the means to the end they really want, namely, reduced environmental impact. As an example: the only places that forests are actually increasing are in North America and Europe.

Melissa McEw*e*n, whom I had never heard of before, but whom I can assure you is a very different person than Melissa McEwan, whom I've heard too much of. Bleh.

I think Heifer International is pretty spectacular. I couldn't convince my kids to donate one night of Hanukkah to them. They said their mom makes them do something similar with one of her nights, can't they just get nice presents? So I said yeah, and donated to them on my own.

(Note to a_random_guy, when complaining of the stupidity of others, proofread, proofread, proofread.)

Thanks - re: McEwen. Corrected. Sorry...tired.

Me too, had the coffee, but not the wine....

(I don't look forward to tomorrow, I ran out of half and half.)

Must need more coffee - I thought I had proofread it...

I've never met anyone who viewed veganism as asceticism for the sake of asceticism. It wasn't about not being luxurious, but about animal rights, environmentalism, or good health depending on the person's motivations. Anti-luxuryism?

That would be silly, because turning down food is the ultimate luxury.

This is yet another game I won't play. "We should" is properly read as "I want you to."

No.

Well veganism can't feed the world either. How much do you think it costs to make a tofurkey?

That being said, I seriously doubt you could raise enough livestock for the entire world to eat the same amount of meat as the average American. There's not enough meat to go around, and me not eating meat literally means there's more for you. That's why I don't get people who hate on vegetarians--I'm doing you a favor!

Asceticism: the doctrine that a person can attain a high spiritual and moral state by practicing self-denial, self-mortification, and the like.

"I've never met anyone who viewed veganism as asceticism for the sake of asceticism."

So apparently you've never met a devout Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim all who practice veganism for the expressed purpose of asceticism.

But what about the non-religious vegan? Isn't the denial of animal products for the illusion of animal rights, environmentalism, or the "greater good" nothing more than an attempt to attain a high moral state? In fact I've never met a vegan who wasn't flamingly self-righteous.

"Too bad the world is full of people who want to make choices for other people."

This is 21st-century politics in a nutshell: people who want to tell everyone else how to live vs. people who don't.

"But what are luxuries and what is extravagant? One lesson I've learned from studying paleolithic cultures is that humans don't really need very much. Bushmen get along quite well without houses or possessions of any kind. This family in Chad gets by with a tent, a few animals, and meager rations of gruel. Most vegans spurning meat as an arrogant luxury go home to well-lit artificially heated apartments. Why are those OK? I don't know. The whole thing seems arbitrary."

Yes, and the point is, this kind of lifestyle works well if all you are interested in is a average life span of about 35 years, which is what the agrarian primitive lifestyle fraught with risk and disease gets you on this planet. However if you want to do "pretend virtue" by living like the 15th century peasant except for all those attributes of modern medicine,clean food and water, and the "few luxuries" you allow yourself (by being a free rider on modern industrial society) then you can be sanctimonious and superior with your pretend agrarian existence without subjecting yourself to any real risk that you and your children will wiped out suddenly in the next revolution or natural disaster.

One of the things pushy vegans don't want to discuss is 'how much land would be needed to grow all the soybeans & etc. your plans would require?' and 'what about people who're allergic to or otherwise can't/won't eat soy products?' The general response, if they bother to answer, tends to be "Shut up!" to the first and "Too bad!" to the second.

In other words, "If they can't live the way I say they should, they can die and get out of the way."

Thanks for the plug!

Oh, Firehand, some vegans have thought about those things. But generally their conclusions are different from ours because they think humans don't deserve choices because really we are no different from rats :)

Jerry, hehe, this often happens to me. Maybe it will come to fruition someday and Melissa McEwan will go paleo :)

"One of the things pushy vegans don't want to discuss is 'how much land would be needed to grow all the soybeans & etc. your plans would require?' and 'what about people who're allergic to or otherwise can't/won't eat soy products?' The general response, if they bother to answer, tends to be "Shut up!" to the first and "Too bad!" to the second."

By and large, these same people won't do, or are not able to do the math on solar and wind energy either. When part of your plan, any plan, requires just waving a magic wand to fill in the gaps, a lot of things initially look feasible when they are not.

There is a fundamental, unpleasant truth: People breed like other animal, namely, they breed until they reach the limits of their food supply.

If you feed Sudan, Bangladesh, or whatever other poverty-stricken area you choose, the only result is more people to feed next year. Before you can really help these people, you first have to get them birth-control, and get them to use it.

The only time and place this is not true is in countries with sufficient technology to offer birth-control to their entire population, and a sufficiently education population that will actually use it. In a word: high civilization.

If environmentalists and leftists like these "neo-puritanists" had the brains god have a sheep, they would support industry and education as the means to the end they really want, namely, reduced environmental impact. As an example: the only places that forests are actually increasing are in North America and Europe.

Posted by: a_random_guy at January 15, 2011 1:23 AM
_______________________

Um, The Hunger Project says - and this sounds logical - that people who aren't sure where their next meal is coming from HAVE to breed, since they clearly don't have anything like Social Security. More importantly, when the infant mortality rate is high, in part due to famine, parents have to have more children. "When people know their children will NOT die, they have fewer children."

In short, hunger keeps the birth rate up, not down.

"In short, hunger keeps the birth rate up, not down."

Too short. Hunger MAY keep the birthrate up but famine, keeps the population down. If you artificially feed populations through famine relief, the uncertainly is still there so you get a higher birthrate but you are keeping the "famine part" from correspondingly reducing the population to a level that their own agricultural efforts can provide for, thus exacerbating the problem down several generations. In China in years past, famine did not reduce the birthrate. What is lead to was infanticide where any children that could not be fed were strangled at birth. This was seen as more humane than letting them starve.

"let them eat tofu"

yeah, for this crowd, I always ask if they know how tofu is actually made, including the processes of growing soybeans and harvesting them. Importantly you have to have land that will support their production. I have heard things about how much protein per acre is available with soybean versus meat production per acre of grazing, but they don't compare directly. There are many places in this world where animals can find forage, where the land is not suitable for farming.

'course that's kinda esoteric for the tofu crowd, they just want you to do as they say.

Birth control actually comes after modernization. In the Sudan, where kids might not make it to adulthood, parents hedge their bets by having lots, which does seem counter-intuitive to the Western mind. But if you feed those kids, they'll grow up stronger, and if you educate them, they'll become more prosperous than their parents, and have fewer kids themselves.

"Birth control actually comes after modernization. In the Sudan, where kids might not make it to adulthood, parents hedge their bets by having lots, which does seem counter-intuitive to the Western mind. But if you feed those kids, they'll grow up stronger, and if you educate them, they'll become more prosperous than their parents, and have fewer kids themselves."

Yes, and relief agencies have been feeding and trying to educate these people ever since the end of World War II which has been 65 YEARS people. If we haven't seen any major successes yet (which in my opinion we have not) you gotta ask yourself, if it is a cultural issue rather than just a matter of applying resources (money and food) to the problem.

Not to defend overzealous vegans (I'm as liberal as they come, but they annoy the hell out of me), but I think part of their hangup with meat-eaters isn't really a matter of being control freaks about other people's diets. They truly believe the lives of animals are invaluable, and they don't want them to suffer unnecessarily because of human consumption. If animals weren't being killed and possibly tortured to become food, I'm guessing the argument would be non-existent. Then it would really would be a matter of, "You eat what you want, I'll eat what I want, and we'll all peacefully co-exist." There's a moral issue for them that their consciences won't allow them to ignore.

BTW, I'm not a vegetarian, and I get that some vegans simply aren't happy unless they're complaining about something.

According to him "let them eat tofu!"

Suddenly, I understand why the rest of the world may not like Americans all that much.

I've eaten tofu, voluntarily. It's just a platform for the sauce being served. And if you don't have a good sauce, well, tofu becomes very overrated.

"You'd have to eat huge quantities of vegetarian/vegan food to get the nutrients you need as a human."

and even then, if you were a child, a Vegan diet is no where near nutritionally sufficient.

Vegans have to deny evolution and human brain development in order to occupy their moral high ground. Even if you think it is immoral for humans to raise meat for consumption, do Vegans think a Gazelle killed by a Lion is any less tortured than a deer shot in the head by a hunter? I argue that the latter is an order of magnitude more humane. Humans no more evolved to live on plants, than a Lion or a Tiger did.

a_random_guy, good idea about the birth control. U.S. should learn that, too.

"How many vegans turn down medical care or drugs when they were discovered or created via animal testing?You'd have to eat huge quantities of vegetarian/vegan food to get the nutrients you need as a human."

This is true. I'd like to imagine they would consider turning down the animal tested drugs once there were alternatives available. I'm not a vegetarian so I can only guess. Then again maybe I'm giving them too much credit. Health-wise my sister-in-law has been a vegetarian for many years and it's always seemed to agree with her.

I'd like to imagine they would consider turning down the animal tested drugs once there were alternatives available

Even if they do the fact that the didnt refuse the animal tested ones when they were the onlt one avalible is proof enough of their hypocracy

Soy should never be a main source of protean for humans. Do a Google search "Hawaiian tofu study"

and even then, if you were a child, a Vegan diet is no where near nutritionally sufficient.

Isabel1130, you are correct, but it applies to adults too. With some effort and attention to detail, a vegetarian diet can be ok - eggs are a perfectly good protein replacement, you have milk for calcium, iron is still a problem but you can get around it, etc - but I don't believe it's possible to get a balanced diet on strictly vegan principles without supplements. Which is why a lot of adults on these diets look pale and sickly. And anyone who forces a strict vegan diet on a growing child is guilty of abuse.

My ex isn't vegetarian but she generally doesn't eat red meat by choice - like a lot of women seem not to in my experience, she simply prefers chicken or fish. And, surprise surprise, she tends to be deficient in iron. It turns out no amount of spinach or silverbeet that you can stomach can match the iron you get from 100 grams of steak. So whenever she comes here for dinner she gets lamb or beef. I just tell her it's medicinal. Of course it helps I know how to cook :)

You don't have to have heaps and I'm the first to admit I eat too much meat, but two to three small serves of red meat a week are very good for you. You can live without it but it makes life much easier.

I've said this here before, but it bears repeating. I tried living as a vegetarian for a while, back when I was in my early adulthood. In hanging out with the vegetarians, I noted that an awful lot of them have eating disorders that they were trying to rationalize. Whatever ethics they arrived at, they mainly back-formed from their own neuroses.

"I've said this here before, but it bears repeating. I tried living as a vegetarian for a while, back when I was in my early adulthood. In hanging out with the vegetarians, I noted that an awful lot of them have eating disorders that they were trying to rationalize. Whatever ethics they arrived at, they mainly back-formed from their own neuroses."

That has been my experience too. I have a distant cousin who was a very picky eater as a child. Would not eat anything with milk or eggs in it if she could help it. She was skinny and undernourished as a small child, and overweight and undernourished as an adult. She now has her weight down to a reasonable level but does it by literally watching every bite that she eats since she eats no eggs or meat. I believe her diet is mostly carbs and is very protein, fat and vitamin deficient. She still has to take supplements and her health is not as good as mine. The irony of the whole thing is that she is the sole heir to a multi million dollar cattle ranch and if she was sensible could be living on delicious grass fed beef.
I eat when I am hungry but rarely eat bread or sweets anymore, and have managed to put my weight on a steady decline. I pretty much have followed the advice in this book and it has worked for me. Real Food: What to Eat and Why

Ltw, you are wrong about iron in meat vs. non-meat sources - for example, lentils actually have more iron than prime rib. There is a difference in the type of iron (heme iron in animal products, non-heme in vegetable products) but that's easily managed. I totally agree with you that it's easier to be healthy eating some meat, however. Someone else up thread said something about milk and calcium, and I believe that's inaccurate now too - I don't think dairy is all that related to calcium absorption. I drink milk and cream because I like them in coffee, but a lot of the health information out there regarding milk is straight dairy industry propaganda.

I eat meat, just infrequently because it's expensive (I won't buy cheap because I won't support factory farms), I am terrible at cooking it, and because honestly except for bacon and burgers, I'd usually rather have beans. Vegetarians I know fall into three camps: animal welfare peeps (I think this is legit), chicks with eating disorders, and people who are outdated in their health information and so think that meat is unhealthy.

Samantha, unless the vegit is willing to explain how killing off wild animals to expand crop production, and how the billions of insects killed by mechanized farming is any less cruel, the whole animal welfare angle is a smoke screen for people without the brain power to think further than their 'feelings'

my two cents...

I'm vegan and I'm an evolutionary psychologist. I was never a lacto ovo vegetarian before I went vegan and I went vegan from one day to the next almost 3 years ago. It is precisely because of the theory of evolution that the theory of animal rights makes sense to me. It makes sense that vertebrates have the same capacity for pain, and much the same capacity to suffer as humans with the exception of the suffering that comes from having future plans and dreams thwarted.

Environmentalists puzzle me often because they don't have a precise idea of what they are saving. Many people want to save the pandas or the whales but somehow saving pigs, chickens and cows lives of tremendous suffering doesn't matter to them. To the best of my ability I do not engage in any actions that directly kill or cause suffering to animals like eating them, wearing them or paying for them to be my entertainment.

There is a great deal of medical knowledge that is understood from animal testing but there is also medical knowledge gained before ethical human experiments. Medical testing on animals in my opinion is the only nonfrivolous use of animals however I do not think that animals should endure suffering to produce new mascara, cleaning supplies or other products that are on their face so unecessary. Animal testing for these purposes, like the LD 50 toxicity test are being phased out.

I have been vegan for 3 years with no ill effects, my boyfriend has been vegan for 20 and in the vegan society I belonged to in England I knew vegans in their 70s and 80s. I also know quite a few vegan children. I am a scientist and I cannot see that being vegan is dangerous, it is possible that it may not be the optimal way to eat but optimal nutrition is not as important to me as living within what I think are ethical boundaries. Pigs have much the same level of sentience as small children and I'm sure that none of you (with the exception of Amy!) would eat children if you found out it was exceptionally good for your health.

Speaking of vegan children, there have been quite a few studies of them, none finding that feeding children a vegan diet was outright dangerous but some finding some deficits in zinc and calcium. Because a picture says a thousand words here is a page with pictures of peoples' healthy happy vegan kids. I know the two boys from Austin.

http://www.veganhealth.org/articles/realveganchildren

one last thing
yes, I do realize that insects and other animals are killed during crop production however a) there is scientific evidence that insects do not have the same sentience as vertebrates and b) fewer animals are killed when one eats plants than if one eats animals directly.

I get the argument about the deaths from agriculture a lot and my response is that I am doing the best that I can to limit the suffering I cause other animals. Just because one cannot completely eradicate the suffering one causes other beings within the scope of a fairly normal life (e.g. without living in a tent in the woods) doesn't mean that one should be satisfied to do nothing at all. Just because we can't cannot or haven't been able to eradicate rape, world poverty, child abuse etc. doesn't mean that it is ok to do it in day to day life.

Diana -

Animals will have rights the moment they are capable of moral agency, and not one second before. Until then, they are servants, companions, scenery and food.

You put an animal down with a single shot to the head, and they're dead before they hit the floor. Compare this with the way that the tiger o the snake kills its prey - by taking minutes to suffocate it while it fights to free itself.

Moral agency is what gives us the capacity to minimize the suffering of the animals from which we derive our sustenance.

When tigers start killing their prey instantly, then we might be able to discuss animal rights. Otherwise, we owe them nothing beyond being good stewards.

And if you believe in evolution then you must consume the flesh of other animals. The teeth tell the tale.

Well, Diana, I'd like to thank you for being honest.

Most vegans wont admit they dont really care about all life, and only care about their own sympathetic pain reponse to other mammals.

But even as honest as you were about your reasons for being a vegan its still rationally insupportable.

Either all life is equaly sacred or it isnt. You can not pick and choose which forms of life are 'better' or more deserving than others. Because quite frankly my dear, that puts you on a WORSE ideological platform as those of us who eat meat.

We dont proclaim some forms of life more 'deserving' of protection and write off others as collateral damage becuase they dont process electrical impulses in a manner close enough to the way humans do to anthropomorphize them

"Either all life is equaly sacred or it isnt. You can not pick and choose which forms of life are 'better' or more deserving than others."

some human beings are in a coma, some are braindead, some can no longer recognize their relatives. The capacity for sentience is integral to the idea of suffering. Nociceptors process pain and some animals do not have the same capacity for pain as others. My computer can process information but cannot feel pain so it is not unethical to smash it... not really sure how to better explain it than this. You are coming at this from a rule based morality position (i.e. all life is sacred) while I am coming at it from a more utilitarian position (i.e. do not cause suffering).

"And if you believe in evolution then you must consume the flesh of other animals. The teeth tell the tale."

I know that every human being is capable of homicide and there is archaeological and other evidence that homicide was an integral part of the expansion of some groups at the expense of others. There is a great deal of evidence that in hard times hunter-gatherer women kill their babies, some think post natal depression is evidence of an infanticide adaptation. There are some people living today that are the product of rape, they wouldn't be here if rape didn't exist. We may have evolved to commit homicide, infanticide and rape. I do not subscribe to the extension of the naturalistic fallacy that because something evolved it is good to do. I also do not think that behaviors that animals engage in are necessarily morally acceptable for humans to do. Yes, I agree with you that cheetahs do not have morals and may painfully kill gazelles. Dogs defecate and copulate in the street... I haven't yet heard that as a defense for either behavior.

p.s.
Children and the mentally disabled are not moral and yet we afford them the same moral status as fully aware adult human beings.

for example, lentils actually have more iron than prime rib. There is a difference in the type of iron (heme iron in animal products, non-heme in vegetable products) but that's easily managed.

I'm not in any way an expert on this topic Samantha (I just play one in comment threads). As far as I understand it though the difference in iron type does matter though in terms of bioavailability.

I totally agree with you that it's easier to be healthy eating some meat, however.

This is pretty much my point. If you eat a variety of different things, and I do eat a heap of different fruits, vegies, cheese, fish, etc along with
my main diet of blue steak washed down with red wine :) you can pretty much stop worrying about dietary problems. You don't even need to know which foods have what as long as you eat eclectically. Once you start cutting out whole food groups, suddenly you need to learn how to compensate. Sure it can be done, but it sounds like too much work for me.

I'm hardly defending my diet, any dietician would be horrified and there's a lot of things that could be fixed about it - to start with, getting 25% of your calories from alcohol and most of your vitamin C from vodka mixed with orange juice is hardly a good idea, I could do with more fibre because I can't face breakfast cereal - but I don't have to worry about vitamin and mineral deficiencies, I'm not overweight (ok, a small roof over the toolshed but I am getting older), I'm reasonably healthy. Without ever having to know or care what different foods provide.

You want to play semantics, I can play semantics.

You claim to be a vegan to reduce suffering, a vegan strives to eat no animal flesh or animal byproducts.

But take free range eggs, the chickens live far better then the would in the wild; they get food, water, shelter, warmth, and protection from predation. By all accounts free range egg laying chickens REDUCE suffering. But you wont eat their eggs, why?

As far as using sentience as a yardstick for what kinds of matter you eat, well quite frankly every living organism from humans down to single celled bactirum has sentience. Sentience is the ability to react to stimuli.

I poke moss with a stick, it causes damage, it attempts to use natural defences - it doest wonder why.

I poke a spider with a stick, it causes damage, it as a mobile life form, attempts to leave or retaliate - it doest wonder why. Same with a cow, or a squirell.

If I poke you with a stick - you wonder why

Do you even understand the order of magnitude of difference there is between reacting to being poked with a stick, and having the capacity to wonder why?

I'm all for treating herd animals humanely, even if the only reason is poorly treated animals die at a greater rate and constitute a waste of resorces. But the reason animals feel 'pain' is beacuse it is a survival resonse.

If getting your hind flank ripped to shreads felt like the worlds greatest blowjob then hebivores would stand around and allow themselves to be torn to shreads, and no more herivores would be born.

Pain motivates you to flee what ever is causing the pain. Hunger motivates you to not starve to death. These are nothing more than biological impulses compelling you to stay alive and pass on your genes.

You might as well rail agianst the fact that many species die after impregnating, or spawning.

Sentience is the absolute worst yardstick by which to judge which lifeforms not to eat. You want to take an animal off the menu, show me one capable of empathy for a different species.

"I have been vegan for 3 years with no ill effects, my boyfriend has been vegan for 20 and in the vegan society I belonged to in England I knew vegans in their 70s and 80s. I also know quite a few vegan children."

Yes, and there are people who manage to smoke into their 80's with no ill effects. However this does not mean a vegan diet is either healthful or optimum. The thing we can never measure is what one individual vegan's health would be like if they were not on a vegan diet. Elderly people in general need much less protein than children and even young adults. Your observations are what is known as anecdotal evidence. Diet is a very complex subject and individual genetic variance will probably account for whether you can survive on a vegan diet for a long period of time. The people in your vegan group are self selecting. You won't here from the ones that gave it up because they felt terrible and or were developing medical problems. An actual scientific study will take those outcomes and include those people in the data. It will also control for those people that "claim" to be vegan because of social pressures but are actually supplementing their diet or their children's diet with animal protein. My guess is because of the social pressures in your group to conform to the vegan lifestyle you will never hear about these cases just as they don't want to discuss the children taken away from their parents for "failure to thrive" on a vegan diet.

Diane can eat how she wants and I don't care. However, at the point when she decides that she's going to petition the government to use its power to force me to eat the way she does, at that point she has crossed the line. And I have yet to meet a self-proclaimed vegan that wasn't eager to cross that line.

Long term vegetarian here; I don't see my choice of food as asceticism, in fact just the opposite. I prefer not to eat animals and I am lucky enough to live in a time and place (and, to be honest, at an income level) that makes this possible. I don't expect others to necessarily see vegetarianism as a luxury, nor do I think less of anyone else for making different choices.