• littlecolt@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    Similar to recycling, the impact is small. There must be large systemic change. My adoption of a vegan diet, or my diligent recycling of aluminum and plastic, is a drop in the bucket.

      • littlecolt@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        Yes, it’s not my responsibility to save that child from poverty. I would also be terrible at it. I would much rather financially support organizations than will assist in saving children from poverty in a more meaningful way, as well as supporting politicians that align with my values as far as lifting not just children, but everyone, out of poverty.

          • OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            That analogy goes so far above what’s happening, at least for the average person.

            Do you buy jeans or any clothing produced outside of the US? BAM, you’re as bad as the people in the factories abusing local communities and child labor.

            Should one attempt to find clothing that is ethical where possible? Then absolutely, and buying a pair of Levi’s doesn’t make you complicit in enabling child endangerment.

            Same with most things, I try my best to already only buy from brands that don’t: support genocide through funding or messaging, discriminate based on sex/race/gender, engage in union busting or union restrictive activities, employ under the table for children or for tax/benefit reductions. So many people try to argue from a place of Absolute Moral Supremacy, and the world is just too grey for that.

            Reduce the meat you eat, yes, that’s a good plan and it’s good for the budget and it’s good for the planet. But humans HAVE been eating animals for longer than we’ve walked upright, so going entirely non-consumption just isn’t going to happen.

            You can make stances as to why it’s a good thing, why it might assist you in the long run, but to conflate it with enabling violence towards spouses? That’s the kind of rhetoric that gets vegans shouted down and laughed at anytime the name is brought up. If you want to make long lasting change, changing hearts and minds will do that, and your tone/style won’t win hearts and minds.

              • OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                I don’t refute that there’s far too much callous cruelty in the production of meat products. I hope there’s a greater push to, at the very least, reduce the suffering to as minimal as possible for the duration of the animals’ lives. I worked on farms growing up, but never factory farms or anything larger than 20-30 cows and flecks of sheep or a barn of egg-laying hens, but the cruelty of factory farms and the shit stained floors and the breeding cages and the systemic abuse, it’s all on another level far above what I’d consider humane.

                Unfortunately, I grew up and had to work on farms, both parents worked separate shifts to have no babysitters best they can, and whatever was cheapest or easiest to shove in our guts is what we were fed. I will attest to the ‘brain washing’ element through the everyday normalcy of buying the cheapest frozen bag of gigantic chicken breasts, but that’s also all my mother and father could afford to feed us, and we didn’t live in a location that had many options for grocery stores (a ‘local owned’ kroger/owens, and a Walmart if you drove another 15-20 minutes the other way). I definitely think, if they had had the training or information or the time and cash, they’d have fed us better meals (I don’t think either of my parents know a single vegan friendly dish).

                All of that to say, myself and many other people were living in conditions incongruous with the forethought and planning necessary to even attempt veganism. The few vegan locations I was able to find when I went to college were terrible, the food wasn’t good, or at least I didn’t like any of it. I’ve had good vegan dishes, but I have to make them, every single one, or I stomach food I don’t enjoy. I can live on apples for lunches, I’ve gone many a day eating throw-together salads, I meal prep grains and veggies each week so that a majority of my meals are already set. But I want meat dishes sometimes. And until there’s a more affordable way to get lab grown meat, the only way I can dive deep into a MASSIVE section of the culinary arts, is through engaging in capitalism that supports a horrific industry.

                In fact, I can’t eat my bananas without inadvertently funding the violent private militias enlisted to put down dissent among the local farmers. My wife has to buy all of her beans through a local seller who supposedly employs previously indentured coffee bean pickers and gives them a fair rate, but surely she can’t only drink coffee she’s made from home, so we’ll try local places (boycotting Starbucks still, options very limited) and not all of those places buy from that bean seller so it’s not all confirmed ethical. The list is exhaustive, and so my minor attribution to the slaughter or those animals is, to me, the same contribution I make to the military juntas who ensured I could buy a banana, and the same as the polluting of the rivers for any manufacturing process or project. Although not worthless, I do value human life above animal life, and so dealing with those internal struggles and questions and navigating where best to purchase fabrics because of the indigo staining children’s hands who wash jeans, to me, are all above the suffering of animals, the sheer number of those animals (the 90 billion figure) does not hold any weight, to me, when comparing the two. So I am just as culpable, to myself, for engaging in those other acts of violence through capitalism, as I am for engaging in eating meat.

                So, I try to buy less bananas and less fruits out of season that aren’t grown locally wherever possible, but I will eat at dairy queen and order a banana split. I reduce the total red meat in my diet because I want to impact the problem where I can, but I do like the taste and I don’t believe that consumption of another animal is wrong, so a dozen cows over my lifetime will bother me morally as much as driving my gas car (I’d do electric, but I couldn’t afford it the 8 or so years ago I bought the car), which is to say, I don’t love it, but I won’t lose sleep over it.

              • Victoria Antoinette @lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                Buying meat is paying for animals to be killed

                no, it’s not. there are people who kill animals, and there are people who pay them, and most people are neither.

                  • Victoria Antoinette @lemmy.world
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                    9 months ago

                    The guy wouldn’t have paid the guy if you weren’t going to pay him.

                    i have no agreement to purchase meat in the future. most people don’t.

                  • Victoria Antoinette @lemmy.world
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                    9 months ago

                    you pay the guy who pays the guy who kills the animals

                    most people don’t do that, either. meat packers will get it from the abattoirs, who will then sell it to suppliers, and there might be two or three suppliers before anyone sells it to a grocer or restaurant.

                    the animal isn’t killed because i create demand, except for meanings of “cause” that don’t require a causal relationship.

                • debil@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  The cost of killing is tied to that package of minced meat whether you accept it or not.

      • Victoria Antoinette @lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Would you refuse to save a child from poverty on the grounds that billions will continue living in poverty?

        this is a terrible analogy because at the end of one, you can point to the person being saved. no animals are saved by eating plants.

    • threeduck@aussie.zone
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      9 months ago

      Couldn’t that logic be used against literally any good action? Like giving $100,000 to a malaria charity isn’t going to stop malaria. If everyone thought like vegans, the world would be vegan, the climate crisis would almost entirely be averted, rivers swimmable, billions of animal lives saved each year.

      If during your supermarket shop, you use vegan recipes instead, you’ll be one of those dominos. You could be the systemic change!

    • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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      9 months ago

      The issue is how then do you get that systematic change? Governments are going to be extremely hard to convince to do anything as along as people expect to consume animal products en mass. It’s going to have to start with individual action until systematic change is palatable

      And with systematic action, it’s still going to have to involve change in consumption in the end. Factory farming is pretty much the only thing that scales. Want to avoid it? We’re going to need to see great drops in production and in turn consumption

      The impacts of people taking action do add up. For instance, in Germany there’s been declines in per capita meat consumption over the past decade

      In 2011, Germans ate 138 pounds of meat each year. Today, it’s 121 pounds — a 12.3 percent decline. And much of that decline took place in the last few years, a time period when grocery sales of plant-based food nearly doubled.

      https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23273338/germany-less-meat-plant-based-vegan-vegetarian-flexitarian

    • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      Yeah, you should go vegan, and also post depressing memes on 196 that make all the carnists feel guilty. That’ll have a bigger impact.