willyoufallwithme:
soycrates:
compassionco:
This post is being prompted by a list posted on buzzfeed called The 19 Most Annoying Things About Being Vegan. While the article is written by a vegan and mostly serves as a love letter to other vegans about some of the day to day annoyances we experience,…
im not vegan, i know that there are horrible things done to animals to create the food we eat. but that is changing, slowly, but it is. farms that treat their animals right, all the animals not just the pets, are becoming a bigger deal. people dont want to eat food that had been treated cruelly during its life.(i get distracted way too easily)i say this because there is change because people are bringing horrible things to light, though a friendly reminder for those overly zealous, choose your moments well and really really think about what you are saying, do not do so at barbques, parties, etc. also try being more logical than emotional, it goes over better with this type of thing. i personally think its better to be a vegetarian than vegan, i have family in healthcare and there are health risks with it like there is with any extreme diet (people who mostly eat meat because not much plant life have higher amount of heart disease) but i realize that it is changing, there are a lot more vegan and vegetarian food out there that gets you alll the stuffs you need. and by diet i mean the actual def, what you are eating. not the trying to get super skinny stuffs. i for one would not be a good vegetarian or vegan, i already have to take nutritional supplements like prenatal vitamins to make sure ive got all the things i need. and sometimes i forget. i forget my other meds too….. as well as being slightly picky about my food…..
i dont care if you are vegan or vegetarian, eat whatever you want. but when people make me feel like im lower because of my personal decisions on what i want to eat, may it be an occasional in n out burger, pepperoni pizza, etc. i dont like that, its not cool. share the facts, tell me why you are vegan/vegetarian. i will listen, but the moment you get judgmental i will close my ears and refuse to accept what you are telling me. thats how people are. maybe find some local farms that are completely organic and awesome to their animals. people can still eat meat and help the movement. okay im dont with my spiel, and i know i probably offended people, i didnt mean to, i just wanted to share my feelings with the world in general.
To start with one of your last points first, if our goal is to have zero animal exploitation then no someone cannot eat animals and help the movement. Reduction of consumption and moving towards a vegan lifestyle definitely helps, but it isn’t the eating animals part of it that helps the movement, it is the reduction of consumption part that does. Nothing about the consumption of animals helps animals at all. It is when we choose to abstain from eating those animals (as well as wearing them, testing on them, exploiting them for entertainment, etc…) that it helps them. Organic is a term that has absolutely no bearing on the treatment of animals. Even finding a small family farm that treats their animals “humanely” still results in their death and exploitation. I spend my days showing people a video that shows all of the legal defended-by-the-industry practices that go on in animal agriculture. Many people respond with “there has to be a better way to do this”, the thing is, there IS a better way and that is to not participate in it at all. We don’t want to see animals treated better, we don’t want them to be a part of this system at all. Why give an animal’s life worth to the point where they should be treated well but not to the point where they should be able to keep their life?
Veganism is not an “extreme diet”. Eating what grows from the ground is not extreme. What is extreme is pouring tons of resources into a “food” product that is killing us as well as destroying the earth and lining the pockets of people who perpetuate repeat human rights violations and who do not give a fuck about any of the people purchasing their “products”.
As far as the nutritional aspects of veganism. Being vegan has been deemed appropriate and healthful for all stages of life by the american dietetic association. Not only that, the rates that the average american is consuming animal products is literally killing them. Heart disease, high blood pressure, certain cancers and osteoporosis to name a few are all being linked to high consumption of animal protein. I do not know your specific health situation so I will not try and claim that you speficially probably aren’t eating enough of this or that, but I will say is that the vast majority of the public does not need any animal products to survive or thrive. Whenever we eat a wide range of unprocessed plant food (fruits, veggies, nuts, seeds, beans) it provides us with all the vitamins, minerals, fiber, phyonutrients, micronutrients and antioxidants we need (exception being possibly b12, easily fixed with a supplement). Most people could stand to greatly increase the amount of unrefined plants they eat, regardless of their consumption of animals. All those GNCs and Vitamin Shoppes out there don’t exist to cater solely to vegans. The standard american diet is greatly deficient in high nutrient content foods. Begin vegan isn’t a guarantee of good health, certainly there is tons of (deliciously decadent) vegan junk food out there, but what we can say for sure is that the foods that promote human health the most (and by a huge margin) are plant foods.
and yes, there is a slow change coming (though a little bit faster in the last few years) but it isn’t because people are demanding more humane animal treatment, it is because people are waking the fuck up and realizing that we can all make a difference by not giving money to people to perpetuate a fucked up system that commodifies living beings.
*footnote: by no means am I excusing or ignoring the fucked up shit that happens in a lot of vegetable agriculture or saying that vegans are perfect on all this stuff, because we got a lot of work to do as well (as indicated in the initial article)
