Anonymous Aug 28, 2017 at 1:17 am

Comments

1
Seriously! I will never understand why people can't mind their own business. I have no interest in policing what other people eat and I certainly do not want anyone policing what I eat. I have close friends who are vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, and ominivores (I don't know anyone who is solely carnivore) and we all get along well, respect each other's personal decisions and live our lives. Every time a vegan starts in with the preaching it simply makes me not want to be around them and to educate them on privilege. Let's solve food insecurity, starvation, malnutrition, food deserts, drought, and the extreme inequality in this world that is directly responsible for these things before we insist that everyone in the world be vegan. Travel the world and get a glimpse of reality beyond your Portland and Pacific Northwest bubble.

A former friend used to argue with me that my mother was "part of the problem" because she did not buy all of our food (including meat, she ate meat, though she would tell people she was a vegetarian - and then eat at Arby's) at the farmers' market. Meanwhile her parents are dirt poor (just like they were when she was a child) and live on soda and fast food and cigarettes. The only way she was able to afford her righteous lifestyle she was so pious about was that she married a wealthy white man who provided her the financial means to eat solely organic, bought at the farmers' market (and as she put it, when she admitted to eating meat) "humanely raised and slaughtered meat." She is a judgemental hypocrite. Every time she leaves the country and lives in other countries for extended periods of time (again, something she is only able to afford thanks to her wealthy now ex-husband), she eats meat. Then she returns to the United States and "becomes" vegetarian again.

People need to mind their own business and do what they feel is best for themselves and leave other people to mind their business and do what they feel is best for themselves.
6
@ Christina Rae - I absolutely love your comment. Could not possible agree with you more, especially about your former self-righteous friend. I'm so sick of people preaching the virtues of their diet from their high horse without realizing that a lot of us simply can't afford to live that way unless we marry someone wealthy, or somehow find a job that pays twenty thousand a year more than we're making, which would basically be like winning the lottery. People need to realize that those of us who are living paycheck to paycheck SUPPORTING OURSELVES AND CHILDREN, can't afford to eat as healthy. And until we figure out a way to make healthy food cheaper for everyone, Veganism will just become another status symbol for the more wealthy, as it already is becoming.
7
@Jarhead My comment in no way is passive aggressive. Project much? My reference to my friend marrying a wealthy white man = a fact relevant to the story. The judgemental hypocrite I'm talking about in my comment is not white and she comes from abject poverty, so yes, her marrying a wealthy white man and his money providing her the financial means to live the life she lives and be a judgemental hypocrite is an essential part of the story.

Also, EVERYTHING IN THIS COUNTRY HAS TO BE ABOUT RACE BECAUSE WE LIVE IN A RACIST SOCIETY THAT HAS MADE EVERYTHING ABOUT RACE.

Finally, you do not understand what racist means. Educate yourself (and no it is not my job to educate you). One more fact: I am white woman (wholly irrelevant, btw).
9
1998 just called - it wants its tired cliche-ridden rant against vegans back.
10
Also, Badluckpalms nailed it - it's cheaper to eat a vegan diet if you have any halfway decent cooking skills. I'm not vegan, but have them in my family, and it's absolutely cheaper if you know your way around a kitchen. The "fancy" vegans everyone hates might buy only the most precious, expensive, and organic shit at Whole Foods and/or the farmer's market, but so do fancy regular folk who go on about their dinner party, or fucking paleo crossfit assholes, or defensive meat eaters who have to respond to the word "vegan" with rattling off the giant plates of meat they recently ate, and now plan to eat, because their tiny egos can't handle someone making different choices than they do.

This is all not to mention that the cost of meat is highly subsidized, both in terms of government subsidies for animal feed crops, grazing land, water infrastructure, etc., as well as the collective price we will all be paying for the "cheap" meat that is factory farmed and already starting to result in antibiotic resistant bacteria, as well as the environmental effect from methane and other animal byproducts that don't get internalized for a true market cost. Meat is currently very inefficient, and should be more expensive than it already is.

Fortunately for everyone, there are significant investments being made (a lot of it from the major factory farm producers - their execs see the writing on the wall) in lab-grown meat, so in 20 years all we will be arguing about is flavor and maybe health, not cruelty or environmental impact.
11
Everyone has their opinion and we all obviously have differing opinions. My opinion is have you ever been somewhere where fruits and vegetables are not available? It's called a food desert. Look into it. There are over 42 million people in this country, mostly children, who live in food insecure households and many of those households rely on food pantries.

Ever seen fresh vegetables at a food pantry? Most food pantries are only able to collect and store canned and boxed foods that are non-perishable. You clearly want to lecture me about how to eat. You have no idea what or how I eat, what my financial situation is, where I live (I do not live in Portland, but I do live in Oregon), or anything else about me. And my comment regarding cost and food deserts and food insecurity and economic inequality isn't about ME it's about the world population at large.

And if you want to talk to about food being subsidized in the United States > CORN IS THE NUMBER ONE SUBSIDIZED FOOD IN AMERICA. Corn is over produced and fed to everyone and everything (including animals being raised for meat) and is why high fructose corn syrup is in everything.

So we could argue back and forth for days and weeks and months to see who is more educated and informed regarding the matter, but it's all truly irrelevant. My original point was you do you and let me do me because there are so many complex, serious, acute problems in the world (like, for example, millions of people starving to death in huge swaths of the world, and they're not eating meat even when they are able to get any food before they starve to death) that we need to face as a global population before anyone can dictate who eats what and what actually costs less and the cost and the damage done regarding specific types of food production.

(And we probably agree more than we disagree, to be honest).

My last 2 cents: the best thing that could ever happen is the eradication of fast food - every burger joint and fried chicken joint in the world. It would put an end to an enormous amount of meat production world wide, would force people to begin to eat differently.
12
Evolution made me an omnivore , an excellent survival adaptation. Who am I to argue about it?
13
Yes, vegans can be patronizing, insulting, self righteous, all that. Just like any human who wants to advance their agenda. Everyone does it. The more important point is not so much what you eat, but how we produce what you eat. Anyone who thinks that our current method of animal agriculture is fair and sustainable has their head in the sand. Huge subsidies make your cheeseburger cheap, for example. The water resources needed for our mega mass production of meat and dairy products are enormous. The amount of greenhouse gases from animal agriculture efforts eclipses those from transportation. On and on. There is a lot of data on these things. But, people don't really care. They'd rather get up in arms about what the crazy president says on twitter. Or about immigrants. Or about people who learn to make tortillas in Mexico. Yes, there is likely no hope for humans. We will continue to shit in our own next until it is uninhabitable. Hopefully, not before we die so it will be someone else's problem.
15
Eating chicken does cause other sentient creatures to suffer - a lot. If you are aware of that, and you don't care, then you are a bad person.
17
I'm not sure the Colonel serves actual chicken anymore, r.a.y., that's why corporate was forced to rename the franchise to simply the initials "KFC"...

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